Tagged with “business”
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This show kicks off what hopefully will be a 10-part mini series where we talk with other businesses that, like us, make money off the web. Some of them will be freemium SaaS (Software as a Service) like us, and some will be more tangentially related. Some will be bigger than us (probably most of them), and some will be smaller.

In this episode we’re talking to Ben Callahan and Rob Harr from Sparkbox about their experience running an agency - hiring employees, forecasting cash flow, diversifying income, how Sparkbox handles apprenticeships, and how they’re handling growth.

I’m warning you now, it’s a very different kind of episode of Unfinished Business this week as Rachel Andrew and I talk about our feelings on the referendum result for the UK to leave the EU. We talk about the issues that will affect us, you and our businesses in the coming months and years and what we’re already doing to help mitigate them.

How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies "originals": thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. "The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most," Grant says. "You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones."

I know. I know! It’s been far too long since episode 117. But fret no more, Unfinished Business fans, we’re back and back for good, every two weeks with some brilliant guests and some good old fashioned conversations. This week, I’m joined by Sean Johnson and Drew McLellan to talk fat and fitness, cruises and coach trips.

On Unfinished Business this week there’s no talk about mugs but Rachel Andrew is back. We’re joined by first timer Richard Rutter to discuss his upcoming book on Web Typography, why he chose to self-publish and fund the project on Kickstarter and the role of a publisher in today’s market. Of course Rachel loves to talk about VAT (irony) so we do that and she explains why she doesn’t actually owe a million Euros to Ireland.

This week on episode 115 of Unfinished Business, I’m joined by returning guests Brad Frost and Stephen Hay. After talking about the best coffee mug in the world, we get right down it and discuss why it’s dangerous to bring computer science principles and heavy development tools into web design.

I’ve been looking forward to speaking with Cennydd Bowles for months and for Unfinished Business 113, Cennydd joins me and my other special guest, product designer Noah Stokes. We kick off by talking about Richard Rutter’s web typography book, but soon the conversation switches to whether, and why, current web designs are lacking ‘soul.’ This is something Noah and I have been speaking and writing over recent months and something that I partly blame on our fixation with user-experience and product design. Does Cennydd agree? You‘ll have to listen to the show to find out.

Alex prepares to go back out to California for a redo. He practices his pitch with his wife and his friend Josh. He adds impressive sounding audience numbers, because, as a friend tells him, no one wants to hear a story about Odysseus going to the corner store. He meets Chris Sacca’s partner, Matt Mazzeo, in the lobby of the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills. Matt used to work at CAA, where he helped launch FunnyorDie.com. He tells Alex that one of the site’s first videos, was the legendary Will Ferrell viral video The Landlord.

Alex’s pitch goes better this time around. And Matt likes it. But he wants Alex to change it. Alex should be going for bigger audiences. He should choose a new name. And he should come up with a whole new way of distributing the content, a way to replace the podcast entirely. Matt says, “there are a whole bunch of things that are broken” about podcasting, and that Alex “has an opportunity to fix them.” To Alex, it seems like Matt’s saying, he shouldn’t just be building a content company, he should be building a technology company as well.